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Blog Comment Links

Hi everyone! Using the Open Site Explorer tool I can see many of my competitors leave blog comments which (according to the tool) are providing link value to their sites. This seems like something that can easily be used in a black hat sort of way.

My question is this - Is leaving comments on blogs an effective way of generating positive links to my site?

4 Responses

You might see the links listed but who says the provide ranking value? Google and other search engines determine their value for rankings. Many of these links are no follow and many of those blogs are probably untrusted or have so few links of their own that the links are worth almost nothing.

My question is this - Is leaving comments on blogs an effective way of generating positive links to my site?

Only if they are followed links and only of those blogs have valuable links from other websites. In my opinion the value of these links is so low that they are not worth going after.

Blog comments are not typically thought of as carrying a whole lot of weight by themselves. However, when you're building your overall backlink portfolio it is good to have some variety to your backlinks - some high quality links, plenty of followed links, some no-followed, some in social, some in places like digg etc.

I would certainly comment if you feel you have something to add to the conversation (and you find yourself doing so naturally, not forced - and definitely don't add any comments on fake blogs) but you don't have to go overboard and spend tons of time seeking out lots of blogs just to get some comments in. Leave them as you would in a natural way. They can add some social value and help round out your overall backlink portfolio, but don't do a whole lot by themselves.

I've been monitoring the rankings of my companies website for the past two years.In May of this year I've noticed a new website appear on the front page of Google for a tier 1, two word search phrase.

Their domain is less than 6 months old and is not a keyword rich domain name. So naturally this raised an eyebrow.

Running their domain through OSE, I can see that out of the 308 external links pointing to the domain.Just two of them were not from blog comments. Their link profile is nearly 100% keyword anchor text links. (They don't have a single link with just their domain name!)

The blogs their links come from have one thing in common, they allow poor quality comments to appear without any review. Most of them are not related to our industry (Ranging from Travel, Hotel, Baby sites, Fitness, Hobby, etc)Because of the lack of quality comment reviewing these blogs have been targeted by people looking to promote sites that I'm sure Google will not want to promote with anchor text links such as:

Fake handbagsFake watches

It's so annoying when you see sites able to rank like this, the only bit of comfort I can take away from this is that should they receive an email from Google asking them to clean up their link profile. They are going to have a hell of a job doing it.

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